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Turning the City’s Wheels in a New Direction

Janette Sadik-Khan, the city transportation commissioner, rode a bike share bicycle at the program’s start in May. The system is among the most visible transit projects during her tenure.Credit
Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Her bike share program attracted more than 95,000 annual members in its first seven months, entrenching itself so firmly in the zeitgeist of New York City that Paul McCartney endorsed the system on “Saturday Night Live.”

She will soon begin a new job spreading the gospel of cycling lanes and pedestrian islands in cities across the country, as part of a consulting group formed by departing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

And last week, Ms. Sadik-Khan held forth with Mr. Bloomberg in Times Square to cheer its permanent reconstruction, walking along the granite pavers that had remade a prime stretch of Broadway.

Mr. Bloomberg, who said he once thought that closing parts of the busy thoroughfare to cars was “the stupidest idea I’d ever heard,” called Ms. Sadik-Khan “outstanding,” before pausing to wonder aloud whether she had written his speech.

But as crews swept confetti from the plaza, nine days before she was to relinquish the job she has called the best in the world, Ms. Sadik-Khan’s mind wandered to a project she never considered, and the mayor who probably would have let her get away with it.

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“One time he said to me, ‘You know, you could change the direction of traffic flow on Fifth Avenue,’ ” she joked.

She turned toward the billboards and grinned, at least a little mischievously.

There are few legacies of the Bloomberg years as indelible as the reimagined streets — the sprawling plazas and painted roadbed instructions at turns celebrated as symbols of smart urban transformation and maligned as emblems of a mayor who meddled too much.

Yet time and again, it was Ms. Sadik-Khan who won Mr. Bloomberg’s ear, or at least his tacit approval.

She has become an international star, drawing adoring crowds for speeches in Sydney and São Paulo, though some of her projects, and at times her confrontational style, placed her at odds with top aides at City Hall.

“She’s General Patton,” said Mitchell Moss, the director of New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation, “brought into the world of transportation.”

She appealed to Mr. Bloomberg, according to conversations with dozens of colleagues, city officials and transportation leaders, not only through relentless cajoling but also with a shrewd fluency in his interests: She capitalized on his thirst for data, even as the Transportation Department faced questions about some of its studies, and fed his desire to frame projects in terms of public safety and urban space, ticking off fatality rates and traffic counts in even casual chats.

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Bike Lanes Three hundred and sixty-five miles of bike lanes have been created; 16,000 bicycle parking racks were added for the growing number of cyclists.Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

“He totally gets it,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said in a wide-ranging interview this month. “He’s been talking about this for a long time. We have to design our cities differently. We have to design our cities for more than the car.”

It was not always this way. This was a mayor who angered transportation advocates by declaring, “We like traffic,” on the grounds that more people meant more economic activity — a man who, officials still quietly suspect, might struggle to ride a bike on the streets his administration has re-engineered. (Marc LaVorgna, the mayor’s chief spokesman, said Mr. Bloomberg knew how to ride a bike, but was unsure when he last rode.)

Before her appointment in 2007, Ms. Sadik-Khan, now 53, was thought to be interviewing for a relatively temporary job, with less than three years remaining in Mr. Bloomberg’s second term. A lawyer by training, Ms. Sadik-Khan was director of the mayor’s office of transportation in the Dinkins administration and was at the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff when she interviewed with Mr. Bloomberg. Inside a City Hall conference room, she recalled, he asked why she wanted to be “traffic commissioner.”

The room was silent, she said. So she kept talking, riffing on bikes, congestion-based pricing and the prioritization of pedestrians. Some officials fiddled with their cellphones. When it was over, she spoke to another finalist for the job, Michael Horodniceanu, now the president of capital construction for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to offer a measure of backhanded congratulations.

“I don’t know why they called me,” she told him, according to Mr. Horodniceanu. “It’s clear that they wanted you.”

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Select Bus Service Six routes have offered off-board fare collection, designated bus lanes, better designed station areas and new traffic signals.Credit
Ed Ou for The New York Times

In fact, Ms. Sadik-Khan recalled recently, the city had already expected to pursue many of the ideas she mentioned as part of its PlaNYC initiative, which had not yet been announced, tempering officials’ outward enthusiasm in the interview.

Even Ms. Sadik-Khan acknowledges that her street remedies were rarely original. A trip to Copenhagen inspired what is now a common practice of protecting bike lanes with a row of parked cars. The city’s bike share program draws on elements of similar systems in London, Paris and Montreal.

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“Janette had a lot of big and bold and at times controversial ideas,” said Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor to Mr. Bloomberg. “I think there’s something about that, intrinsically, that appeals to the mayor.”

Some proposals seemed to be without precedent. Last week, Mr. Bloomberg recalled his response when Ms. Sadik-Khan revealed her plans for Broadway and Times Square: “You want to do what?”

Ms. Sadik-Khan said in an interview that Mr. Bloomberg was skeptical of the initial models presented by the Transportation Department, which included a simulation of car traffic before and after the change.

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Pedestrian Plazas Fifty-nine new public plazas have been created from active vehicular lanes, adding over 71 miles of pedestrian-friendly space over all.Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

The mayor was reassured when the Transportation Department said it could test the effects of the change on congestion using GPS data from taxicabs.

But the timing of the overhaul was another matter. Officials gathered at City Hall in winter 2009, in the room where Ms. Sadik-Khan had once sat for her job interview.

“There was a lot of concern that this was going to happen in the middle of an election campaign,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said. “We went around the table. I don’t think there was a consensus that this was the right time to do this.”

It was Mr. Bloomberg who delivered the final word, Ms. Sadik-Khan said: “I don’t ask my commissioners to do the right thing according to the political calendar.”

Several former city officials described an at times adversarial relationship between Ms. Sadik-Khan and some of the mayor’s top advisers. She was known as an eager “forum shopper,” some said, petitioning one official after another until she received the answer she sought. After the blizzard of December 2010, she was admonished for appearing to publicly deflect criticism to Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner.

Though her defenders do not dispute her intensity — and some point to a binary, with-us-or-against-us mentality — she is widely viewed as one of Mr. Bloomberg’s most significant hiring choices.

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Citi Bike Five million trips were taken during the first 150 days of the bike-share program; over 95,000 people have subscribed as annual members.Credit
Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

“This was not an administration of wallflowers,” said Edward Skyler, a former deputy mayor to whom Ms. Sadik-Khan reported until his departure from City Hall in 2010. “She fit right in.”

Indeed, those close to Ms. Sadik-Khan have worked diligently to burnish her image. Her press aide has been known to express displeasure when she is not the first city transportation official quoted in a news article. The city’s contract with Alta Bicycle Share, the operator of the bike share system, stipulated that the group was not to speak to the media without the Transportation Department’s consent, even as the Bloomberg administration withheld details about the reasons for a delay in the program’s introduction.

When John Pucher, a professor at Rutgers University and longtime cycling advocate, was conducting research in 2008 on a project for federal transportation officials, the city’s Transportation Department asked that a title be changed, he recalled. It had included the phrase “Lessons for New York.” An aide to Ms. Sadik-Khan preferred “Lessons From New York.” (Mr. Pucher and his collaborator, Ralph Buehler of Virginia Tech, refused.)

Some elected officials have also questioned the veracity of some of the department’s data, including estimates of bike ridership. The department has repeatedly defended its figures, pointing most often to citywide safety improvements and injury reductions in areas with bike lanes and pedestrian plazas. Traffic fatalities in the city have fallen about 30 percent since 2001, though much of the decrease occurred under Mr. Bloomberg’s previous transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall.

Among global transportation experts, Ms. Sadik-Khan is nearly universally lauded. She became president of the National Association of City Transportation Officials and filmed a TED talk this year about high-impact, relatively low-cost streetscape experiments.

Last month, after a speech in the West Village outlining her team’s accomplishments, Ms. Sadik-Khan talked with a line of autograph-seekers, who clutched copies of a “sustainable streets” manual issued by the department.

“People fought over Prospect Park West as if it was the Gaza Strip,” she told the small group, prompting overeager laughter between gulps of white wine. She was referring to a controversial bike lane opposed by Ms. Weinshall and the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, among others.

Inside each booklet, Ms. Sadik-Khan scribbled a message. “Thanks for your work on sustainable streets,” several read, in part. “We need your energy to write the next chapter!”

Breaking away from the gathering, one attendee, Eylul Wintermeyer, from Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was asked what she had done to earn Ms. Sadik-Khan’s gratitude.

“I don’t drive,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on December 30, 2013, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Turning the City’s Wheels in a New Direction. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe